Paul and Phyllis Nitze took us under their generous wings and included us in weekend activities at their spectacular farm on the Potomac in Maryland. Sheila and I were close to the Nitze children and later our boys to their grandchildren. The weekends at the farm were a cozy mix of family, policy talk, and sport, featuring ferocious tennis games between people like the CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald, Stewart Alsop, and a variety of admirals and generals. I remember asking Paul at one of these events what he thought of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. “Foster Dulles was a bore and a fart!” Nitze replied, never one to mince words.
We started our family. Adam was born in July 1958. His first month of life was marked by a severe case of pneumonia, which almost killed him and taught his parents more about the fragility and value of life than anything that had happened before. Taking the advice of my father-in-law, I spent the summer of 1958 as a trainee at the Baltimore investment banking firm of Alex Brown and Sons, working in all their departments for a dollar an hour. We bought our first house, in the old town of Alexandria, and moved there.
I took the Foreign Service exams again. The Board of Examiners, noting that I had showed up once more, this time a year older, married, and a father, and with some real-world economic experience under my belt, decided to let me in. It took another year to complete the security and medical clearances (obtaining urine specimens from an infant was a challenge) and for the Congress to appropriate the money to bring in another class of new Foreign Service officers.
The call came in April 1959 to report to the A-100 course at the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department’s equivalent of boot camp. The choice was made.
2
Choosing China
A Rude Shock
In 1959, the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, now located on a handsome Virginia campus named after Secretary of State George P. Shultz, occupied the garage of an ugly brick apartment building across the Potomac River named Arlington Towers. There, in hastily assembled, mostly windowless, wallboard compartments, our training as junior diplomats began. I reported to the “A-100” indoctrination program for new recruits, a gentle, dull survey course on the infrastructure of American diplomacy, the organization of the State Department and its constituent embassies and consulates abroad, and the roles and relationships of other government agencies involved in foreign policy. The eagerly awaited climax of our training came toward the end of the twelve-week course, when we learned where our first posts would be.
Eligible for assignment anywhere in the world, we were invited to state our preferences. A European history major from Harvard with a Johns Hopkins masters degree in international relations and tested German language skills might be considered for work in Europe. Right? Wrong! My orders were for the U.S. Consulate in Windsor, Ontario, where I was to serve as vice consul in the visa section. A quirk of geography had placed this Canadian border city due south of Detroit on a peninsula, the Foreign Service Post Report told us, of “poorly drained soil, whose principal crop is rutabagas.” Windsor produced cars and Canadian Club whiskey in flat, prosaic surroundings totally at variance with the dreams of a brand new diplomat bent on seeing the world and witnessing history.
My A-100 classmates, including future ambassadors Brandon Grove and Allen Holmes, thought my assignment was hilarious and razzed me incessantly. They had received orders for glamorous sounding places like Isfahan, Iran, Yaoundé, Cameroon, and Paris. I felt crushed and humiliated. State Department Personnel insisted I go, arguing that Canada was in the European Bureau and a good place to start. Three other applicants had wriggled out of the assignment, one because, he argued, his mother-in-law lived in Detroit.
A New Idea
Roaming the halls of FSI in shock and despair, I ran into Herbert Levin, an older friend from Harvard who had joined the service a few years before. What was he doing at the Institute? I asked. Studying intensive Mandarin Chinese, came the answer. Why? There are no posts there, I continued. Well, there will be, came the reply. History is on our side. The Far Eastern Bureau of the State Department, he added, is free of prejudice toward Jews, an important factor in his own decision.
Having never given a single thought to China, I was intrigued. The year was 1959. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was failing, and news of the resulting turmoil and starvation was filtering into the Western press.
I was influenced by the example of Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen, ambassador to the Soviet Union, France, and the Philippines and later under secretary of state. Bohlen had fashioned a famous career in the Foreign Service by choosing to study Russian at a time when the United States had no relationship with Moscow. He calculated that the time would come when U.S.-Soviet relations would be paramount and he would be in the thick of things. Chinese was clearly the current analog. My father had roomed with Bohlen at Harvard and introduced me to him the summer I went to college. He endeared himself to me instantly by telling how he had survived in life despite being expelled from St. Paul’s School five days before graduation (the legend was that he had inflated a condom in the library).
Levin, who already knew the ways of the bureaucracy, recommended that I put in a strong application for Chinese language training before I left for Canada, and then do the research during the two years in Windsor to determine if I really wanted to proceed. The State Department would not force a hard language on unwilling officers. The process was simply too expensive.
I pondered Herb’s advice and consulted Sheila. The hard language option provided a rudder for Foreign Service careers. There were few jobs in Europe for young officers and lots in Asia, provided you learnt a core language. Senator McCarthy had purged the Foreign Service of many competent China specialists. Chinese was culturally relevant to more Asian countries than any other language. Personnel officers, I had learned the hard way, did not care what you knew before you entered the Foreign Service. But if they made their own investment in training you, they had to justify your onward assignments to congressional watchdogs. In cold blood, I decided that Chinese language training represented the perfect combination of interest, expense, and opportunity. I applied for a training slot two years hence. The officer in Personnel told me to forget about it. An untried junior FSO with no Asia background had little chance. I urged him to remember my face, because I would keep coming back until he approved my request.
Three months later, after passing a grueling FSI course on immigration law and visa procedures, we left Washington for Windsor, Sheila, infant son Adam and I, stuffed into a small German car. The plan was to issue visas by day, read about China at night, and see where that would lead.
The First Call
The Consulate in Windsor was a four-man post where Foreign Service officers traditionally began or ended their careers. I was by far the most junior, the only vice consul in a section that issued eight thousand visas a year to immigrants, Canadian commuters, and visitors from all over the world. The offices were on one floor of an old office building on the Detroit River, with the skyline of the Promised Land shining through the window. A 23-year-old novice, I was to decide who got to go there and who did not. replacing a consul of long tenure, locally known for his skill at the poker table, and more so for entertaining guests in his office barefoot. He suffered from a psoriasis condition made worse by wearing shoes. Colleagues reported that he would put his scaly feet on the desk when meeting others with whom he felt at ease.
The new boss had spent years as a clerk in debilitating posts along the Mosquito Coast in Central America. He had become a Foreign Service officer in the late 1950s under the Wriston program, which sought to integrate into one officer corps all the different components that made up the service, including the Foreign Service Staff and the Civil Service. Fresh from an assignment heading the visa section in a large embassy in Latin America, Windsor was his first command.
Sheila and I prepared meticulously for our formal first call on the consul and his wife. Carefully following the guidance from ”Social